The Horowitz Machine

Inlakesh argued that Kirk’s rise was no accident. He described Kirk as the direct product of David Horowitz’s political machine, built on a web of Zionist donors and right-wing think tanks.

“Charlie Kirk is really the product of the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the interconnected web of donors and think tanks… At the center of it was David Horowitz.”

Kirk himself acknowledged the centrality of these networks.

“When (Horowitz) passed away, Charlie Kirk himself said that Turning Point USA — all those original donors, about 90% of them — came through the connections that David Horowitz provided,” Inlakesh said.

Now, let’s look at who was Horowitz (Mostly took from Wikipedia)

Horowitz was the son of Jewish high school teachers Phil and Blanche Horowitz. His father taught English and his mother taught stenography.^[3] His mother’s family emigrated from Imperial Russia in the mid-19th century, and his father’s family left Russia in 1905 during a time of anti-Jewish pogroms. Horowitz’s paternal grandfather lived in Mozir, a city in modern Belarus, prior to leaving for the U.S.

Late Horowitz wrote against United States intervention in the Kosovo War, arguing that it was unnecessary and harmful to United States interests,^[64] but supported the interventionist foreign policy associated with the Bush Doctrine, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq.^[65] He also wrote critically of libertarian anti-war views.^[66]

Horowitz opposed Barack Obama,^[67] illegal immigration, gun control, and Islam.^[68][69] He endorsed Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump

Criticism of Islam and Arab cultures

Horowitz was critical of Palestinians, claiming that their goal is to wipe out Jews from the Middle East.^[80] “No people have shown themselves as so morally sick as the Palestinians,” he said at Brooklyn College in 2011.^[81]

Horowitz published a 2007 piece in the Columbia University student newspaper, saying that, according to public opinion polls, “150 million out of 750 million Muslims support a holy war against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims.”^[82] Speaking at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in February 2010, Horowitz compared Islamists to Nazis, saying: “Islamists are worse than the Nazis, because even the Nazis did not tell the world that they want to exterminate the Jews.”^[83]

Horowitz created a campaign for what he called “Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week” in parody of multicultural awareness activities. He helped arrange for leading critics of radical Islam to speak at more than a hundred college campuses in October 2007.^[84] As a speaker, he was repeatedly met with intense hostility.^[85][86]

In 2008, while speaking at University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Horowitz criticized Arab culture, saying that it was rife with antisemitism.^[87] He referred to the Palestinian keffiyeh, a traditional Arab head covering that became associated with PLO leader Yasser Arafat, as a “symbol of terrorism”. In response, UCSB professor Walid Afifi said that Horowitz was “preaching hate” and smearing Arab culture.^[87]

Horowitz used university student publications and lectures at universities as venues for publishing controversial advertisements or lecturing on issues related to Islamic student and other organizations. In April 2008, DHFC advertised in the Daily Nexus, the UCSB school newspaper, saying that the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) had links with the Muslim Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, and Hamas.^[88] The next month, Horowitz, speaking at UCSB, said that MSA supports “a second Holocaust of the Jews”.^[87] The MSA responded that they were a peaceful organization and not a political group.^[88] The MSA’s faculty adviser said the group had “been involved in interfaith activities with Jewish student groups, and they’ve been involved in charity work for national disaster relief.”^[87] Horowitz ran the ad in The GW Hatchet, the student newspaper of George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Jake Sherman, the Hatchet‘s editor-in-chief, said claims the MSA was radical were “ludicrous”.^[89]

He became an early user of the question “Do you condemn Hamas?” which he directed to a Muslim student at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) on May 11, 2010.^[90][91] The student was a member of UCSD’s Muslim Student Association, then holding Justice in Palestine Week, which students said Horowitz had referred to as “Hitler Youth Week”.^[90][91] In 2017, Horowitz’s Freedom Center targeted pro-Palestinian professors and students.^[92]

In a 2011 review of anti-Islamic activists in the US, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified Horowitz as one of ten people in the United States’ “Anti-Muslim Inner Circle”.^[93] He was also described as “the godfather of the anti-Muslim movement”,^[94] and as “possibly the number one counter-jihad personality”, financing many other groups through his organization.^[95]

In 2017 Horowitz’s center put up posters on university campuses naming students and professors who support Palestinian rights, with the names taken from the anonymous doxxing group Canary Mission.^[96][97]

Responses to Horowitz’s views

Some Horowitz accounts of U.S. colleges and universities as bastions of liberal indoctrination have been disputed.^[98] For example, Horowitz alleged that a University of Northern Colorado student received a failing grade on a final exam for refusing to write an essay arguing that George W. Bush is a war criminal.^[99] A spokeswoman for the university said that the test question was not as described by Horowitz and that there were nonpolitical reasons for the grade, which was not an F.^[100] Horowitz identified the professor^[100] as Robert Dunkley, an assistant professor of criminal justice at Northern Colorado. Dunkley said Horowitz made him an example of “liberal bias” in academia and yet, “Dunkley said that he comes from a Republican family, is a registered Republican and considers himself politically independent, taking pride in never having voted a straight party ticket”.^[100]

In another instance, Horowitz said a Pennsylvania State University biology professor showed his students the film Fahrenheit 9/11 just before the 2004 election in an attempt to influence their votes.^[101] Pressed by Inside Higher Ed, Horowitz said that the claim was hearsay from a “legislative staffer” and that he had no proof it happened.^[102]

Horowitz’s books, particularly The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America, were criticized by scholars such as Todd Gitlin.^[103] The group Free Exchange on Campus issued a 50-page report in May 2006 in which they take issue with many of the books’ assertions: they identify specific factual errors, unsubstantiated assertions and quotations that appear to be either in error or taken out of context.^[104][105]

Chip Berlet, writing for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), accused Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture of being one of 17 “right-wing foundations and think tanks support[ing] efforts to make bigoted and discredited ideas respectable.”^[106] Berlet accused Horowitz of blaming slavery on “black Africans … abetted by dark-skinned Arabs” and of “attack[ing] minority ‘demands for special treatment’ as ‘only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others”.^[106]

Horowitz died from cancer at his home in Parker, Colorado, on April 29, 2025, at the age of 86.